Greg Abbot is wrong about gun control

 

Memorial at the site of the Allen, Tx shooting

Fair warning: this will be political, because I am angry—angry beyond words at Greg Abbott who is johnny-on-the-spot with praise for police and offers of all state support systems after a mass shooting but does nothing to prevent them, angry at the people who are growing numb, shrug their shoulders and say nothing will be done. I cannot believe that we have to live this way, afraid to go to the mall, to a ball game, to a birthday party, for heaven’s sake.

I’m not sure how Abbott has convinced himself guns are not the problem—oh, wait, I know. It’s the campaign money he gets from gun manufacturers and the NRA. After the shooting in Allen this weekend, he was way too quick to say there would be no review of gun laws but a focus on mental health. In a Sunday Fox News interview (yep, take the easy ones, Greg) he explained that the state has been grappling with this for a year now. Grappling has done them no good, because nothing has gotten better since Uvalde.

Mass shootings in Texas began, remember or not, in 1966 with the UT Tower shootings. Here’s a list of those since:

Daingerfield Baptist Church, 1980

Grand Prairie, 1980 (I don’t remember this one)

Luby’s Cafeteria, 1991 (boy do I remember that one)

Fort Worth Wedgwood Baptist Church, 1999 (I was at a meeting in my church wondering about all the sirens)

Fort Hood, 2009 and 2014

Ambush of Dallas police at a protest, 2016

Sutherland Springs Church, 2017

Santa Fe High School, 2018

El Paso WalMart, 2019

Midlan-Odessa shopping enter, 2019

Uvalde, 2022

Cleveland, Texas 2023

Allen shopping mall, 2023

Notice how the frequency increased after 2016? Perhaps because of loosened gun restrictions in the state? Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015. I am not saying, of course, that Abbott caused the shootings, but I am saying someone might look at the connection between loosened gun control and the frequency of shootings: more people had easier access to guns. IF I were Abbott and had that on my record, I would be quick to want to solve it and clear my good name.

Abbott claims focus on mental health is the answer, albeit a long-term answer. My first question is what he means by mental health, which is a catch-all nothing phrase, useful as a sop to the voting pubic. The variety of mental problems in any population is mind boggling. How does he plan to detect them? What programs will he institute? What kind of timeframe does he project? Biggest question of all: if he’s been grappling with mental health in the Texas populace for a year, why did he cut funding for those programs by over $200,000 last year so that Texas is the state with the lowest funding for mental health problems in the country. Greg is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

As for time, we don’t want to wait years for mental health programs to create a healthy population where no citizen wants to kill their neighbors. That’s not going to happen.

I’m willing, even eager to say that most mass shooters have mental health problems. To me, no one in their right mind could gun down countless people, including children, with those merciless weapons. But detecting them before the act is another thing: mental health is a huge net with lots of holes in it. Why and how did the Allen shooter get a weapon, when he had a record of extremism clearly documented online?

In almost all mass shootings, it becomes clear after the event that the shooter should never have had a gun. Texas does have background checks (my mistake, because I thought it didn’t)—a check so superficial that a store clerk completes it while the buyer stands at the counter and waits. And you do have to register with a federal database, probably for ATF. And if you order online, the weapon does not go to you but to a federally licensed store where, presumably, a check is done. Checks at gun shows are to say the least problematic.

It seems obvious that guns in the hands of the wrong people are the problem. An effective solution: ban assault weapons and immediately stop their production by manufacturers. A tall order, but it can be done. It was under Clinton and could be again, although there are millions more assault weapons in the hands of individuals now.

What to do about the weapons already out there? A buyback program would only be minimally effective, but how about a registration program that involved new background checks and heavy fines for failure to comply?

Background checks must be thorough and intense, with a long enough waiting period for a deep check to be done. By contrast I read somewhere that you can now rent an assault weapon for an hour or so—to vent your frustrations, I guess. There are minimal  restrictions.

One small step toward sanity: a bill to raise the purchase age for assault weapons from eighteen to twenty-one was passed out of committee today and will now go to the full Texas House for consideration. It might have stopped the Uvalde shooter but few others.

There is absolutely no reason for any civilian, eighteen, twenty-one, or eighty-five, to own an assault weapon designed to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible. Those weapons are killing our friends and neighbors, our children. It doesn’t have to be that way.

How Not to Start the Day

 

Image of Sophie because i needed 
something light-hearted for a somber post.
I refuse to post a picture of an assault weapon.

Well, that was exciting. I’m here to tell you that at 6:10 or so in the morning, it is still very dark. As in pitch-black, feel-your-way-around dark. This morning Sophie and I were up at 5:00 because she was acting strange and staring at the kitchen door. I got up prepared to catch night visitors in the act of vandalizing our cars. I peeped under a shade on the kitchen door. Nothing. Was that movement behind Jacob’s SUV? Was the back of his SUV open? Hard to tell in the total dark.

I decided it was nothing and went back to sleep, only to be startled awake a little after six. Confused at first, I couldn’t figure out where I was nor why I was awake. Then I realized there were no lights. I sleep with a lamp on in my living room and yard lights blazing. I feel guilty about the latter, because I now it disturbs the daily cycles of birds and night critters, but I trade the guilt for a feeling of being safe against night visitors and other unsavory characters.

But this morning I’m not sure if the power made a noise when it went off or if the sudden dark itself woke me, but suddenly there I was awake and a bit disoriented. I reached for my walker and could only find one handle—that’s was the disorientation you get in true dark until your eyes adjust. Finally I made it to the kitchen and peeked under that same shade. Far as I could tell lights were out in the main house and the houses on both sides. Then I ventured into the living room and saw that the neighbors behind me were also dark.

I sat at my desk and turned on the light on my phone, which was suddenly awfully bright. Couldn’t figure out why I would need it, turned it off, and went back to bed. All this time, Sophie was following close by me, confused I’m sure. I wasn’t back in bed long before the lights came back on.

Later I learned that a driver had died in a one-car accident several blocks away. His car was speeding down Forest Park Boulevard, hit the guard rail, flew across open space, hit an electric pole, landed on its side and caught fire. May he rest in peace. Jordan told me the power went off several times, but briefly each time. I guess I slept through the others.

When I finally woke up and made it to my desk, hot tea in hand, I found myself inundated with TV news and analysis of the school shooting in Nashville. Suddenly, I was white hot angry—angry at the shooter, of course, but even angrier at the Republican politicians who tried to brush it off with their tired arguments.

Gym Jordan accuses Democrats of trying to politicize a tragedy. Well, you know what—it is indeed a political issue: Democrats want a ban on assault weapons and reasonable gun control; Republicans want to whine about the second amendment and their rights. (They need to study the second amendment and stop bending it to their wishes.) They want to investigate Hunter Biden and drag queens and Mark Twain’s books, but heaven forbid they should care about let alone protect the lives of America’s children.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, that odious bag of puffery, yells about the gender-bending medications the shooter was taking and how they caused the whole thing. Our children won’t be safe, she claims, until teachers are armed. Oh good job, MTG, what we need is more guns. Does she know how many guns were outside the Uvalde school, waiting while children were slaughtered. A good guy with a gun is not the answer.

Neither can she nor anyone else claim that gender-bending drugs caused this tragedy. Guns did it. Say it out loud: guns killed those children and adults. The shooter was being treated for an emotional problem. Think about this: if assault weapons had been banned, and if strict gun control had kept weapons out of the shooter’s possession because of mental instability, how different would yesterday have been?

With each tragic school shooting, the reasonable among us think maybe this is the one, the one that will galvanize the country, make our leaders and our people realize how wrong this needless slaughter is. How far out of step we are with other civilized nations of the world. And then the furor dies down. Not. This. Time.

I hope every Democrat on every ticket will take courage in hand and campaign on the twin issues of gun control and abortion. Call out the hypocrisy! Call out the callous carelessness about human life, the blind ideas that defy knowledge and studies and medicine. We won years ago with Roe v. Wade, we got an assault weapon ban in 1994, we can do it all again. We just have to be fired up. Please—do whatever you can. Speak out, call  your congressmen. We do not have to live like this.

Amen.

 

Orlando--as if enough hasn't already been said

A few years ago a relative came to town to visit with one request: she wanted to go to a gay bar. So two or three of my girls took her—and I can’t remember if they took some guys with them or not. Was I worried? Yes, I was. Not about someone hitting on them-they’re big girls and can handle that. But about violence breaking out at the bar—the fisticuffs kind of violence. I never thought of the horror we saw in Orlando last night. But this was a small bar, not a sprawling nightclub.

So much has been said, so much of it spot on, that I am hesitant to add anything. But two points stick out in my mind: one was expressed on Facebook earlier today when someone posted that she hated to see this referred to as the record mass shooting, for fear that someone with hate or anger would think, “I can do better than that. I’ll show them.”

The other thought on my mind is sort of a “Here we go again.” After each of these mass shootings, Americans are outraged and vow to do something to prevent such atrocities. But time goes on and headlines fade, and nothing changes. I’m not sure what it will take to wake Americans to the fact that their chance to change things comes this November—Vote Out the NRA. So many have said today that there is no reason for assault weapons to be in the hands of anyone but the military, and I truly believe that’s where we must start.

In Texas, my two senators are wildly conservative and opposed to any gun legislation, so I feel stymied. But I will find a way to make my voice heard. I have seven grandchildren in school, from high school to elementary, and yes I worry about each of them every day. Nobody thought about gun violence when my kids were in school—it just didn’t exist. But we have had 988 mass shootings since Newton—and what has been accomplished to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally incompetent and others who shouldn’t have them? Not much.

I could argue until I was blue in the face about the weaknesses of the Second Amendment for today’s world, but I won’t even go there. Getting AR-15s and other assault weapons out of the hands of citizens seems more important.

Ask a family member left behind by the Orlando shootings.

No, this wasn’t a terrorist attack; it was not Muslim inspired. The shooter was a deranged man who hated LGBT folks. But why are we letting people like that have such easy access to assault weapons?

Jesus weeps tonight—and many of us join him.

 

The agony of losing a child

I had nothing on my mind tonight to post except that I've had a case of the lazies today big time. Did manage to do my yoga, run one errand, and mostly fiddle the morning away until it was time to meet a friend for lunch--the one who forgot our date yesterday. Guess what? I sat in Carshon's half an hour before I came home and ate my own good leftovers. A bit more fiddling, a nap. and then it was time for Jacob. We went to the Grill early tonight, ran into good friends and had a fine time. But that was my day, nothing remarkable.
Until I frittered away an hour tonight on Facebook. I saw more times than I could bear the agony of Richard Martinez, whose son died in the shootings at Santa Barbara. It was palpable agony, on the surface, with no attempt to hide it. And I heard his plea, "Not one more." I can't even begin to think about how this grieving man will move on with his life, and yet he had the courage to air his grief publicly, to make his plea in person and on the air. Much as I hurt for this man, I like and admire him.
And then I saw where Joe the Plumber said callously, "Your dead kid doesn't trump my right to carry a gun." Someone said he's either making a grandstand bid for attention or he's an a-hole. I think it must be both. But how can he? What happened to him to make him so insensitive? I cannot even begin to imagine.
And, finally, I saw where the open-carry folks, with their assault rifles over their shoulders, had invaded another restaurant, trying to intimidate a meeting of a small group of Moms for Gun Control. Once again, I am stymied, amazed by the stupidity of people. To those who argue Second Amendment I want to assure them that although I am no constitutional scholar, I know that is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. No one seems to recall what to me are some sensible interpretations of the Second Amendment--it calls for an armed, "well-governed" militia--that does not mean crazies walking around with assault rifles. And that amendment was written in the day of muskets--you fired, then you stopped and re-loaded (a complicated and not quick process). No one envisioned today's assault rifles.
What scares me most is that I think (and this is pure prejudice on my part) that those who flaunt these weapons of mass destruction (hey, isn't that what we went to war for in Iraq, even if in error?) are the least stable portion of our population. They're the ones most likely to shoot on mad impulse. A friend, a teacher, wrote that one of her most responsible students posted decrying these open-carry demonstrations and another, much less stable student replied, "Hey, I'm with those guys. I have an assault rifle." Point taken.
Our country has made so much progress in civil rights, we're moving ahead in marriage equality, we're changing with the times as we should. I think gun control is the next big thing on the agenda--but how many people will have to die first? If Sandy Hook didn't move hearts--and the NRA--Santa Barbara isn't going to do it.
I have a friend who decries the fact that people are afraid the government is coming for their guns. They're not, people. Even the president has said so. We just want controls on who has access to guns and maybe what types of guns. If you don't think it's needed, read a bit about the mental history of the Santa Barbara shooter.
PS Dating myself, but open carry to me still means the right to carry a bottle of liquor or a drink. Oh, dear, I'm a hopeless old fogy.
Yeah, this ended up being a rant. But at least now I have some energy. Lazies gone.